Call for Proposals

European History / Studies, Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, Military History, Russian or Soviet History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

Call for Papers: International Journal of Military History and Historiography

Special Issue: Women and the Second World War

The International Journal of Military History and Historiography will commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War with a special issue dedicated to the wartime experiences of women.

The literature of the Second World War has shifted from a narrow focus on political, military and diplomatic interpretations of the origins and management of the war to a much wider assessment of events and actors. Indeed, the global nature of what has been termed “total war” mobilized entire populations of citizens and colonial subjects. Women were very much a part of this war of movement and the events that dislocated and traumatized civilians and combatants. To date, much of the literature focuses on women on home fronts as workers, as spies and as consumers. Holocaust studies have revealed the scale of Nazi crimes against humanity as well as strategies of survival. More recently, scholars have uncovered the sexual slavery experienced by Chinese, Korean and Japanese women endorsed by the Japanese military. This special issue of the International Journal of Military History and Historiography looks to extend this literature to interrogate and foreground the wartime experiences of women beyond the home front.

The journal is particularly interested in articles that foreground women as actors in national and transnational settings in the military and as partisans; as doctors, nurses and midwives; as exiles and refugees; and as colonial subjects and occupied citizens.